I've been kinda out of the loop on PC hardware lately, but I'm upgrading my brother's PC. He's currently running a Athlon 64 on a DFI Ultra-D motherboard with 4GB of Ram and a Geforce GTX 250. Looking at upgrading the CPU, RAM, and motherboard. Looking at about $500 budget.

So far I've decided on the Intel Core i5 2500K. Looking for a good P67 motherboard and what 8GB Ram kit you would recommend to be able to overclock the 2500K well. I've been looking at the Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte P67 boards, and not really sure which to go with.

I am Gigabyte board fan too , second one best i like is Asus & nothing else as a board...

Anyhow now is really a bad time to upgrade just wait about 3 weeks when Bulldozer be out & then decided which way to go AMD or Intel there is a good chance that Intel will lower there prices on most of they CPU's , you may safe lots of money by waiting only just a few weeks

Having built systems in the mid 2000s I don't have good impressions of either ASRock or Biostar but I've heard they have come a long way.

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ASrock is now it's own company and has made great boards since the tail end of S775, I had one with my Q6600 that ran much better than the ASUS it repplaced. BioStar has some ofthe best P67/Z68 mobos on the market in terms of performance. I reccomend the TZ68A+ since for $100, you can't beat it.

For RAM, I reccomend G.Skill Ripjaw's since they are just as good as that Corsair Vengence (maybe better) and are usually the cheapest kits as well (fantastic value).

Wow, didn't realize they got rid of IDE on these P67 boards. Seems only the Asus has an IDE controller. He still has 2 great working IDE optical drives.

Edit: Would this system have any trouble running off of an older Cooler Master eXtreme Power 600W PSU? My concern about it is that it only has a 4-pin motherboard/CPU power connector, though I would imagine a 4 pin to 8 pin adapter should work fine. Correct?

Wow, didn't realize they got rid of IDE on these P67 boards. Seems only the Asus has an IDE controller. He still has 2 great working IDE optical drives.

Edit: Would this system have any trouble running off of an older Cooler Master eXtreme Power 600W PSU? My concern about it is that it only has a 4-pin motherboard/CPU power connector, though I would imagine a 4 pin to 8 pin adapter should work fine. Correct?

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EDIT: Never mind about the IDE part... miss reading the optical part of it...

As for your PSU having only 4 pins for the motherboard 12v it will work still , i had an old 500w PSU with only 4 pins also & a motherboard AM2+ with 2x4 pins connector & it worked fine with only the 4 pins in even with an overclock CPU (800+)

You may want to consider some lower profile ram (traditional ram heatspreaders) if you plan to get a monster air heatsink to overclock.
Get ddr3 1600 or 1866 - not much benefit other than AIDA64 benchmarks above that...

It's for my brother who is looking to play BF3, and yes he will be upgrading the videocard soon too, but probably a few months down the road. So yes, it's mostly an upgrade for gaming.

In terms of overclocking, why would it be better to go with 4x2 Ram? I've always overclocked PCs with 2 sticks of Ram no problem. Not looking for a huge overclock, but just a nice solid overclock to maybe 4Ghz or so on air cooling.

In terms of overclocking, why would it be better to go with 4x2 Ram? I've always overclocked PCs with 2 sticks of Ram no problem. Not looking for a huge overclock, but just a nice solid overclock to maybe 4Ghz or so on air cooling.

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High density IC's. From what I know by hear-say, Sandy bridge IMC, doesn't particularly care for them. Think you can wait to build this for about another 2 weeks and wait for AMD FX lineup?